The Sea, the Sea

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘So now I’m like an eel! I never twisted and turned where you were concerned. I always wanted you and no one else. I am the faithful one. I never got married.’

  ‘Yes, but you lived with women, you lived with that old actress. ’

  ‘All right, but I couldn’t find you! You were the one I wanted! I tried and tried to find you, I searched and searched and somehow I never really gave up hope—and perhaps that’s why I’ve found you now.’

  ‘I’ve been unjust to Ben.’

  ‘Oh God, can’t we forget Ben, Ben’s over.’

  ‘He suffered so much about Titus, when Titus disappeared, it was like a penance.’

  ‘Maybe he did, but he deserved to suffer, he drove Titus away. I expect he was glad really.’

  ‘No, no, he wasn’t so bad to Titus, not as much as I said. He was severe—’

  ‘He was violent. And to you. Don’t try to defend him. Oh don’t let’s talk about that bloody man.’

  ‘The protection of children people never came, I said they did but they didn’t.’

  ‘Oh damn the protection of children people, what do I care whether they came or not?’

  ‘But I said they did, and they didn’t.’

  ‘Even if they didn’t come, they ought to have come.’

  ‘But it wasn’t true.’

  ‘Why are you trying to whitewash that vile cruel man? Titus hates him. Isn’t that evidence enough? It is for me.’

  ‘Ben hasn’t anyone in the world but me. He hasn’t any thing in the world.’

  ‘He’ll survive. What about me? Why not be sorry for me for a change? I’ve waited long enough. There’s nothing so derelict as an old actor. What have I got now but my memories? I’ve stripped myself of all the power and all the glamour—for something—and the something, although I didn’t know it, was you. You can’t let me down now.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think I believe in Jesus Christ. You’ve got to believe in something and hold on to something. People would go mad without God, wouldn’t they. We used to talk about that, didn’t we.’

  ‘I’m glad you haven’t forgotten those talks. You remember when we were confirmed? It meant a lot, didn’t it? Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire . . .’

  ‘I think I believe in the remission of sins.’

  ‘We all need a spot of that.’

  ‘Love redeems, that means something, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well don’t tell me you propose to redeem Ben by love! I’m getting sick of Ben. What about redeeming me?’

  ‘No one else will redeem him, no one else will love him.’

  ‘Jesus will love him.’

  ‘No, you see, for Ben, I’ve got to be Jesus.’

  ‘This is mad talk, darling, really mad. Just try to think a bit. Doesn’t it occur to you that Ben would heave a sigh of relief if you left him? Damn it, you’ve left him already. You aren’t all that necessary. He mightn’t want to send you off, but he’ll be jolly pleased now you’ve bolted.’

  ‘You want to make him unreal, but he’s real.’

  ‘Real things become unreal when you enter into the truth.’

  ‘Our love wasn’t real, it was childish, it was like a game, we were like brother and sister, we didn’t know what love was then.’

  ‘Hartley, you know that we loved each other—’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t make love properly, I wish we had.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to, I wanted to all right—Oh, Christ!’

  ‘We were children. You never became part of my real life.’

  ‘What you call your real life appears to have been hell on earth! Damn it, you said so yourself. A happy woman doesn’t talk about death.’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t told you things, I’ll regret having told you things. Of course it’s a muddle, but it’s my muddle, it’s where I live and what I am. I can’t run out of it and leave it behind all jagged and loose like a broken shell.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you can do! Escape, run, leave it all behind! See that the pain can stop!’

  ‘Can it? Can the pain stop?’

  As she now stared at me, wide-eyed with a sudden pausing puzzlement, I wondered, is she mad, is her mind totally astray, is she just a poor wreck, or has she become some sort of fey spiritual being, refined by suffering? Had that strange wild look of her youthful beauty which I had loved so and worshipped been the first prophetic flush of a weird spirituality? There are secret saints with strange destinies. Yet no, she was a wreck, a poor broken twig, her integrity, her last identity, destroyed by the cruel force which had made her abandon Titus. But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.

  ‘Yes, my darling, my queen, my angel, it can stop.’

  Oh if only I could touch and liberate her mind! I wanted to see her hoping, to see some dawn of hope or desire, the desire for cherishing, for a happy life. But she frowned now in her puzzlement and reverted to Ben.

  ‘I’ve never been good enough to him.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve been a saint, a long-suffering saint!’

  ‘No, I’ve been bad.’

  ‘Oh all right, call it bad if you want to! Whatever it is, it’s finished.’

  I saw her then as innocent, as men in the past used to see cloistered girls and think: ‘We are beasts, but they are angels, pure, not soiled like us.’ I saw her as beautifully innocent, simple-minded, silly, understanding nothing: a reproach to me who had lived my life among vain egoistic men and pert, knowing women. Yet also I saw her guilt as real guilt for real failures. How could it be otherwise? And I remembered Peregrine’s words: the partner who feels guilty, however irrationally, becomes the slave of the other and can take no moral stand. She had taken upon herself, as well as her peccadilloes, his guilt. She felt herself guilty of his sins against her, against Titus. I could see it all. And as she took up the guilt, appropriated it as her own, she revered the guilty one and held him as holy. Oh, if only I could release her from that maiming crippling guilt and from that empty reverence! God, she even felt guilty about me and had to console herself by thinking I hated her! She was spell-bound, bound by a self-protective magic, which she had developed over the years to defend herself against the horrible pain of having married a foul insanely jealous bullying maniac. She had been brainwashed through fear of him, brainwashed by hearing the same things repeated to her again and again and again: that it was her fault, always her fault. No wonder Titus wanted to go and sing on the rocks rather than be reminded of those scenes.

  She had cried a little. The tears of age are not the tears of youth. ‘Stop crying, Hartley, you look like the pig-baby in Alice, like you used to.’

  ‘I know I’m ugly, horrible—’

  ‘Oh, my dear, come out of it, come right out of it, come out of the nightmare—’

  She dabbed her eyes with my handkerchief, let me hold her hand for a moment, began again to reflect.

  ‘But what makes you think my marriage is so unhappy?’ She was gazing at me now with an almost cunning look, as if she were about to produce a devastating refutation of anything I might say in answer.

  ‘Hartley, darling, you’re in a muddle. You admitted you were unhappy, you spoke just now about the pain of it!’

  ‘Pain is different, in any marriage there is pain, life is pain—but perhaps for you—it all just passed you by.’

  ‘Perhaps it did, thank God.’

  ‘You know, so many nights quietly at home I used to think of people in labour camps—’

  ‘If you had to cheer yourself up by thinking that at least you weren’t in a labour camp you can’t have been very happy!’

  ‘But what makes you think my marriage is so bad, how can you judge? You can’t see, you can’t understand—’

  ‘I can ju
dge: I know.’

  ‘But how can you know, it’s just an idea, you don’t understand about marriage, you’ve just lived with women, it’s different, you haven’t any evidence.’

  ‘About you and him—I have, yes, evidence.’

  ‘You can’t have. You’ve only just met us, you don’t know anyone who knows us, well, like that, no one knows us, you can’t have evidence.’

  ‘Yes, I have, I’ve heard you talking to each other; the way you talk to each other—’ I said this in a final burst of exasperation and I have to confess with some desire to hurt. The calm obstinate persistence and now that superior cunning expression was driving me wild.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I listened, I hid outside the window and listened to you and him talking, I heard his coarse voice, his brutal bullying manner, the way he shouted at you, the way he made you say over and over again “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”. I wish I’d broken the window, I wish I’d broken his bloody neck. I’ll kill that man. I wish I’d pushed him into the sea.’

  ‘You listened—you heard—when?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember, a week ago, two weeks—I’m so upset I’ve lost all count of time—so you see you can’t pretend any more, you can’t whitewash him and tell me you’re happily married, because I know the truth!’

  ‘The truth—oh, you don’t understand! You listened—how long?’

  ‘Oh, ages, an hour, no, I can’t remember—you were shouting at each other, it was perfectly horrible, at least he was shouting and you were whining, it was disgusting—’

  ‘How can you—you don’t know what you’ve done—how could you push in, spy on us like that—it was nothing to do with you—how could you intrude into secret things which you couldn’t possibly understand—it’s the wickedest vilest most hurtful thing anybody’s ever done to me—’

  ‘Hartley, darling, you know I only did it to help, I mean because I had to know, I had to be sure, to be certain—’

  ‘As if you could know anything—oh, you’ve hurt me so much, I’ll never forgive you, never, it’s like, it’s like a murder, a killing—you don’t understand—Oh, it hurts so much, so much—’

  ‘Darling, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t imagine—’

  Sitting bolt upright against the wall she was now crying as I have never seen any woman cry (and I have seen many). Tears seemed to shoot out of her eyes in torrents, then her wet mouth opened in a sort of strangled shout, an animal cry of tortured pain. Then she gave a low shuddering wail, and fell over sideways, grasping at her neck, pulling at the dressing gown as if she were suffocating. The wail was followed by a shuddering gasp, and in a moment she was in hysterics.

  I jumped up and watched her, appalled. Well then did I understand what Titus had said about it: it is frightening and it is meant to be. I felt that the most violent assault was being made on my spirit, on my sanity. I had witnessed hysterical screaming before, but nothing like this. I knelt again and tried to hold her, to shake her, but she seemed suddenly so strong and I so weak, and also to touch her had become terrible. She was shuddering rigidly with a dreadful damaging electricity. Her face was red, wild with tears, her mouth dribbling. Her voice, raucous, piercing, shrieked out, like a terrified angry person shrieking an obscenity, a frenzied panic noise, a prolonged ‘aaah’, which turned into a sobbing wail of quick ‘oh—oh—oh’, with a long descending ‘ooooh’ sound ending almost softly, and then the scream again: this continuing mechanically, automatically, on and on as if the human creature were possessed by an alien demonic machine. I felt horror, fear, a sort of disgusted shame, shame for myself, shame for her. I did not want Titus and Gilbert to hear this ghastly rhythmical noise, this attack of aggressive mourning. I hoped they were far away on the rocks singing their songs. I shouted ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I felt I should go violently mad if it went on for another minute, I felt I wanted to silence her even if it meant killing her, I shook her again and yelled at her, ran to the door, ran back again. I shall never forget the awful image of that face, that mask, and the relentless cruel rhythmical quality of that sound . . .

  It ceased at last, as everything dreadful has to cease, even if it ceases only by death. My presence, my cries, had no effect on her, I doubt if, in a sense, she knew I was there, although also, in a sense, the performance was for me, its violence directed at me. She became exhausted, stopped suddenly and fell back as in a faint. I seized her hand. It was cold. I became panic-stricken and would have run out and shouted for a doctor, only I was too frightened to leave her and too exhausted to make any decision. I lay down beside her and embraced her, uttering her name again and again. Her breathing became deep, regular, as if she were sleeping. Then I looked at her and saw her eyes open. She was looking at me again with that strange cunning look, as if now she were actually estimating the effect of her ‘fit’. And when, later on, she began to talk again she sounded quite sane, quite rational, indeed more so than she had been earlier on.

  ‘Oh, Charles—darling—I’m so sorry—’

  ‘I’m sorry—I’m a fool, an insensitive idiot.’

  ‘No, no—I’m sorry I got so upset and made such a nasty noise—I suppose I’m in a state of shock.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sweetheart.’

  ‘That’s all right. Tell me—how long have I been here, in this house?’

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘Has he been here, my husband? Or has he written me a letter?’ This was the first time she had asked this.

  ‘He hasn’t sent a letter, I would have given it to you. He came, on that morning after you arrived.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He wanted you to come home, and—’

  ‘And what?’

  I was feeling so chastened and confused I went stupidly on, ‘He said he’d brought the dog back with him.’

  ‘Oh—the dog—the dog—I’d forgotten—’ Some more tears welled up and ran over her cheeks which were so bloated with crying that she was almost unrecognizable, but she controlled herself. ‘Oh dear—oh dear—I do wish I’d been there when the dog came.’

  ‘Look, Hartley,’ I said, ‘you don’t seem to be capable of thinking about this business, so let me think for you. We can’t go on like this. I’m beginning to feel like a terrorist. You’ve put me in a position where I have to play the bully, which is the role I detest most of all. All right, I don’t know what your marriage was like and maybe it wasn’t all that awful and he wasn’t all that awful, but it obviously wasn’t a success and I don’t see why you should put up with a violent and unpleasant man any longer when you don’t have to. You can walk out. I daresay you would have walked out before if you had had anywhere to walk to. Now you have. Let’s go to London. This situation here is driving me mad. I’m letting it go on because I don’t want to force you, I don’t want you to say later that you didn’t decide for yourself. I don’t want to be forced to force you. Have some consideration for me, and for Titus. I’m very fond of Titus, I regard him as my son, yes I do. And he hates that man, and if you go back to him you’ll never see Titus again. You’re not just choosing between me and your ghastly failed marriage—please forgive my language—there’s Titus in the scales as well. Let’s go to London, all three of us, and then away somewhere, anywhere. We’re a family now. What I’ve never had since I left my parents’ home. Let’s go away together anywhere you like and chase after some happiness. Wouldn’t you like to see Titus happy? He wants to be an actor, I can help him. Don’t you want to see him happy?’

  She listened to me, but towards the end of the speech began shaking her head. She said, ‘Please, please don’t force me to go anywhere, you’d kill me. I have got to go home. You know I have got to go, and you know I don’t want to stay here. There isn’t going to be any—any—what you want—it would be like a miracle in my mind.’

  ‘Oh yes, Hartley, my sweetheart, wait for that miracle, wait for it, its name is love.’

  ‘No, that is not its name, and it hasn�
��t come and it won’t come. Don’t you see you are working to destroy me? Now he will never believe me, never. And that is your doing, your crime. It’s like a murder. Never, never, never.’

  Soon after this she said she was very tired and would sleep, and I left her.

  I awoke suddenly. The moon was shining into my bedroom, where I had omitted to pull down the blind. I could hear the splash of the sea and a very faint rattle of the stones which the waves were gently clawing as they withdrew from the cauldron. It must be low tide. I could hear also, or sense, a vast void, a dome of silence, within which my heart was beating exceedingly fast. I felt suffocated and had to sit up abruptly and gasp for breath. I remembered, as I now did whenever I awoke, with a pang of anguish and love and fear, that Hartley was in the house. At the same time I felt the most terrible dread, a premonition of some catastrophe, some horror, or indeed the certainty that it had already occurred. I began to get out of bed, trembling violently, and fumbled for my candle. I lit it and then stood up and listened. The void dark house was ominously quiet. I very quickly opened my bedroom door and looked down the landing. There seemed to be a dim light coming from the alcove, but perhaps it was a trick of the moon. I listened and seemed to hear a beating sound, a heavy noise, deep and accelerating, very very far away. I moved slowly forward, putting each foot down carefully so as not to make the boards creak. I could now see quite clearly Hartley’s door and the key in the lock. I wanted to reach it, to put my hand onto the key, but I was afraid to hurry, afraid to enter that terrible room. I got the key into my hand and turned it and stepped in through the doorway holding my candle. The mattress on the floor, at which I always looked on entering, was empty, the bedclothes disordered. Hartley was gone—I stared about, ready to cry out with panic fear. And then I saw her—she was standing in the corner. I thought, how odd I had forgotten how tall she is. Then I thought she is standing on something, how odd, she must be up on the chair or the table. Then I saw that she was suspended from the lamp bracket. She had hanged herself.